Thomas Osborne Davis
Edited by T. W. Rolleston
Whole text
- p.350
- The tribune's tongue and poet's pen
May sow the seed in prostrate men ;
But 'tis the soldier's sword alone
Can reap the crop so bravely sown!
No more I'll sing nor idly pine,
But train my soul to lead a line—
A soldier's life's the life for me—
A soldier's death, so Ireland's free! p.351 - No foe would fear your thunder words,
If 'twere not for your lightning swords—
If tyrants yield when millions pray,
'Tis less they link in war array ;
Nor peace itself is safe, but when
The sword is sheathed by fighting men—
A soldier's life's the life for me—
A soldier's death, so Ireland's free! - The rifle brown and sabre bright
Can freely speak and nobly write—
What prophets preached the truth so well
As HOFER, BRIAN, BRUCE, and TEET ?
God guard the creed these heroes taught—
That blood-bought Freedom's cheaply bought
A soldier's life's the life for me—
A soldier's death, so Ireland's free! - Then, welcome be the bivouac,
The hardy stand, and fierce attack,
Where pikes will tame their carbineers,
And rifles thin their bay'neteers,
And every field the island through
Will show “what Irishmen can do!”
A soldier's life's the life for me—
A soldier's death so Ireland's free! - Yet, 'tis not strength and 'tis not steel
Alone can make the English reel ;
But wisdom, working day by day,
Till comes the time for passion's sway— p.352
The patient dint and powder shock,
Can blast an empire like a rock.
A soldier's life's the life for me—
A soldier's death, so Ireland's free! - The tribune's tongue and poet's pen
May sow the seed in slavish men ;
But 'tis the soldier's sword alone
Can reap the harvest when 'tis grown.
No more I'll sing, no more I'll pine,
But train my soul to lead a line—
A soldier's life's the life for me—
A soldier's death, so Ireland's free.
A Song for the Irish Militia
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Title statement
Title (uniform): A Song for the Irish Militia
Author: Thomas Osborne Davis
Editor: T. W. Rolleston
Responsibility statement
Electronic edition compiled and proof corrections by: Beatrix Färber and Juliette Maffet
Edition statement
1. First draft, revised and corrected.
Extent: 897 words
Publication statement
Publisher: CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts: a project of University College Cork
Address: College Road, Cork, Ireland—http://www.ucc.ie/celt
Date: 2012
Distributor: CELT online at University College, Cork, Ireland.
CELT document ID: E850004-035
Availability: Available with prior consent of the CELT programme for purposes of academic research and teaching only.
Source description
Source
- First published in the Nation on 1 February 1845.
Other writings by Thomas Davis
- Thomas Davis, Essays Literary and Historical, ed. by D. J. O'Donoghue, Dundalk 1914.
- Sir Charles Gavan Duffy (ed.), Thomas Davis, the memoirs of an Irish patriot, 1840-1846. 1890. [Reprinted entitled 'Thomas Davis' with an introduction of Brendan Clifford. Millstreet, Aubane Historical Society, 2000.]
- Thomas Davis: selections from his prose and poetry. [Edited] with an introduction by T. W. Rolleston. London and Leipzig: T. Fisher Unwin (Every Irishman's Library). 1910. [Published in Dublin by the Talbot press, 1914.]
- Thomas Osborne Davis, Literary and historical essays 1846. Reprinted 1998, Washington, DC: Woodstock Books.
- Essays of Thomas Davis. New York, Lemma Pub. Corp. 1974, 1914 [Reprint of the 1914 ed. published by W. Tempest, Dundalk, Ireland, under the title 'Essays literary and historical'.]
- Thomas Davis: essays and poems, with a centenary memoir, 1845-1945. Dublin, M.H. Gill and Son, 1945. [Foreword by an Taoiseach, Éamon de Valera.]
- Angela Clifford, Godless colleges and mixed education in Ireland: extracts from speeches and writings of Thomas Wyse, Daniel O'Connell, Thomas Davis, Charles Gavan Duffy, Frank Hugh O'Donnell and others. Belfast: Athol, 1992.
Davis, Thomas Osborne (1910). ‘A Song for the Irish Militia’. In: Thomas Davis: Selections from his prose and poetry. Ed. by T. W. Rolleston. Dublin and London: The Talbot Press, pp. 350–352.
You can add this reference to your bibliographic database by copying or downloading the following:
@incollection{E850004-035,
author = {Thomas Osborne Davis},
title = {A Song for the Irish Militia},
editor = {T. W. Rolleston},
booktitle = {Thomas Davis: Selections from his prose and poetry},
publisher = {The Talbot Press},
address = {Dublin and London},
date = {1910},
pages = {350–352}
}
Encoding description
Project description: CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts
Editorial declarations
Correction: Text has been proof-read twice and parsed.
Normalization: The electronic text represents the edited text.
Quotation: There is no direct speech.
Hyphenation: Soft hyphens are silently removed. When a hyphenated word (and subsequent punctuation mark) crosses a page-break, this break is marked after the completion of the word (and punctuation mark).
Segmentation: div0=the poem. Page-breaks are marked pb n="".
Standard values: Dates are standardized in the ISO form yyyy-mm-dd.
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Profile description
Creation: by Thomas Davis
Date: 1840s
Language usage
- The text is in English. (en)
Keywords: literary; poetry; 19c
Revision description
(Most recent first)
- 2012-01-31: File proofed (2), file parsed; SGML and HTML files created. (ed. Beatrix Färber)
- 2012-01-16: File proofed (1); header created; structural and content markup applied. (ed. Juliette Maffet)
- 1996: Text captured by scanning. (ed. Audrey Murphy)